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Exhibit highlights Europe's war fears and innovation

It is hard to discern whether the man’s face, emerging from a dim, theatrical light, is seen through a fractured windowpane or a shattered mirror. It’s hard to know whether the impenetrable blackness that permeates the self-portrait — the first artwork in a photography show that opens Saturday at the Milwaukee Art Museum — is supposed to be flat or infinite space.

But the uncertain and unsettling image of Polish painter and photographer Stanislaw Witkiewicz’s face, cracked apart, seems a fitting symbol for "Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918 to 1945."

The show presents the work of more than 100 artists experimenting with photography in a fragmented Central Europe between the world wars. People and nation-states, wounded by war, were holding onto their histories but also redefining themselves in a rapidly changing world of skyscrapers, mass media and new technologies.

The pace of invention and sense of desire are palpable. This art was pursued at a feverish clip and with the zeal you’d expect from amateur enthusiasts. These artists had a preoccupation with, fear of and devotion to the technology that was itself a symbol of the change happening around them.

From hauntingly ambiguous portraits to an almost child-like cut-and-paste aesthetic, from dizzying and dense mashups of modern architecture to defiantly activist images, the works in the show vary remarkably but are united powerfully by a drive to invent new ways of seeing.

The result is a largely untold slice of art history, the role photography in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary and Poland played in the evolution of European modernity.

As rare as it is to uncover such a rich and overlooked bit of history, though, this show hardly feels like a history lesson. What could be more relevant to our lives than exploring a moment in time when creative energies, technology, media and culture connect in unprecedented ways, when ways of communicating visually are revolutionized?

A subtly complex, luminous suite of images by Czech artist Jaromir Funke can be found in a section of the "Foto" exhibit devoted to art schools, where the "look" of modernism was being defined.

His collections of floating, warbled rings, glowing sheets of white and sharp, dagger-like shafts were created with little more than mat board, glass negatives, darkroom flasks and remarkable adeptness with the camera. Resembling photograms, they keep their compositional secrets close to the vest, straddling the look of believable pictorial space and abstraction.

The female visage was, of course, one of the more profound changes of modernity. A room devoted to shifts in gender roles and particularly the "new woman" is one of the most tightly edited, varied and provocative sections of the show.

Leni Riefenstahl, the athlete turned controversial filmmaker, represents one version of a new feminine ideal in a photograph by Hungarian Martin Munkácsi. She is, all at once, lithe, athletic, damp with sweat and put together and fashionable in a vaguely flapper-like way.

In "Movement," by Frantisek Drtikol, a woman’s slim form becomes part of an abstract composition, with everything but her masculine jaw and muscular shoulder cast in shadow. Though reduced to a mere form, a shadow falls across her breast with the line and look of a fitted ball gown, hinting at her femininity.

Midway through the show, what was a growing divide over views about modern life surfaces in "Foto," where the exhibition space opens up, showing off the Calatrava wing’s own modernist bones for the first time in years.

With disorienting views from tall structures, some artists present the I-beams and machines from the Industrial Age as menacing and isolating, while others seem to romanticize the can-do architectural boom of the 1920s and ’30s. Some of those romantic views served sinister purposes. Paul Wolff’s clean, restful image of the under-construction autobahn, from 1936, for instance, associates modern beauty with the power of the Nazi regime.

Whether foreboding or romanticized, many of these works, such as Rudolf Kramer’s "Garbage," a visually incomprehensible heap of modern junk, are not so different from much of the quick-and-dirty, technology-fueled art coming out of China today, where the march to modernize is on fast-forward.

The greatest surprise, for me, was the surrealist photography by artists I’d never heard of. Some, like Herbert Bayer’s "Lonely Metropolitan," are as iconic as many of the French counterparts that we’re more familiar with. In it, two hands are held up before us, in supplication and bluntly cut off below the wrists. They gently cup a pair of eyes, like strange stigmata that look back at us, as if we’re being drawn into an experience of specialized suffering. The whole thing is backed by nondescript urban buildings.

When alone and in hiding at the start of World War II, Jindrich Heisler was inventive and creative. His works in the show, among the last, were horrifying, poignant and among the most compelling for me.

He stretched and morphed the shapes in his compositions by dragging melted glue over photographic images. What vaguely looks like a figure in an indescribably desolate landscape looks as if he’s made of porous, eroding bone and restrained within a sticky, web-like substance. The darkness and psychological drama of this piece, whatever the artist may have been trying to portray, is undeniable.

What persists in "Foto," organized by the National Gallery of Art, are the formal and conceptual ambiguities. What’s light and shadow? What’s material and immaterial? What’s the role of men vs. women? What is photography and what’s not? What’s an homage to architecture or a critique of modern cities? What is ethnic pride and dangerous propaganda? What’s reverence and what’s fear?

If you go

SOME EXHIBIT-RELATED EVENTS

Unless otherwise noted, all events in conjunction with "Foto" are at the Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 N. Art Museum Drive. For more information, including prices, go to www.mam.org or call (414) 224-3200.

(Note: Not all films from the "Modernity and Tradition: Film in Interwar Central Europe" program, organized by the National Gallery of Art, are included in this listing. Go to mam.org/FOTO/film.htm for a complete listing.)

Thursday: "StoryCorps — Listening Is an Act of Love." Hear recorded accounts of Milwaukeeans telling about life in Central Europe before they immigrated to the States. Share stories with facilitators of the national StoryCorps project. 6:15 p.m.

Feb. 20: "City Films" program one. Several short films, including "Jewish Life in Krakow" (1939) by Shaul and Yitzhak Goskind, at the UWM Union Theatre, 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd. 7 p.m.

March 1: "Homeland, Homeland: My Country" film program with "The Blue Light" (1932) by Leni Riefenstahl (the film that caught Adolf Hitler’s eye). 1 p.m.

March 8: Book discussion of interwar-era literature. 10:30 a.m.

March 9: "Celluloid Myths and Celluloid Dreams" program one with "The Dybbuk" (1937) by Michal Waszynski, in Yiddish with subtitles. Discussion afterward with curator of photographs Lisa Hostetler and Jody Hirsch of the Jewish Community Center. 2 p.m.

March 13: Take an in-depth look at "Nazi chic" fashion with Irene Guenther, who explores the Berlin fashion industry during the Weimar years and the Nazi efforts to form both gender and a "modern fascist fashion." Book signing to follow. 6:15 p.m.

March 22: "The Popular" program one with "The Last Laugh" (1924) by F.W. Murnau. 1 p.m.

April 3-4: Two-day symposium — "Picturing the Modern: Photography, Film, and Society in Central Europe, 1918-1945." Revisit a time of unparalleled development in new media and critical thinking that in many ways parallels our own. Includes the 1930 film "The Blue Angel" by Josef von Sternberg on April 3. Co-sponsored by the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

April 6: Target Family Sunday: "Foto Fun" event for families including a scavenger hunt, experimentation with photography and making photo collages and photograms. Free with general admission. Noon to 4 p.m.

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Keep up with the art scene and trends in urban design with art and architecture critic Mary Louise Schumacher. Every week, you'll get the latest reviews, musings on architecture and her picks for what to do on the weekends.